Bertha Kitts (her real name) was looking for a place to start a small shop in 1914, and she found one, in Hawksburn. The railway station of this small suburb, between South Yarra and Toorak, had just been rebuilt and the line quadruple-tracked; small rows of red-brick double-storey shops were built on either side. Kitts took one, opening a dairy produce and fruiterers’ shop, essentially a fresh grocer.
The three other tenants — estate agents, tea rooms, dressmaker — would have known her as a modest fellow shopkeeper. They didn’t know, but we know (thanks to Australia’s world-class, addictive “Trove” history search engine) that Bertha had possibly been a professional thief.
In 1908 Kitts narrowly escaped a sentence for running the old hat scam: she and an elderly gentleman came into a North Melbourne haberdasher, and while he was being attended, she pushed him into the assistant and left with a hat she was trying on. When apprehended, the whole scenario was so confused that no-one could be prosecuted. It was a standard move, in the great days of the “short con” — no conviction was recorded, and it was buried in the local paper for Emerald Hill (South Melbourne). Getting away from any scandal was as simple as moving a few train stations down the road.
Hawksburn was the place to do it. This now-entirely built up, very bougie ‘burb was one of Melbourne’s first carved-out spec-built developments, bordered by Toorak Rd (north), Malvern Rd (south) and Mathoura Rd, just beyond Williams Rd, to the east. And westward? Well, no-one knows where Hawksburn stops and Prahran starts. By Chapel Street, you’re well out of it. But when? It is one of the mysteries of Hawksburn. It just fades away. Maybe Lambs Kebab on Malvern Rd marks it, the border running through the middle of the shop. Hawksburn (the name is the English form of Hapsburg, a hawk’s nest) comes in and out of existence, a ‘burban Brigadoon, summoned when anyone can manage to reassert that it is. It is not without quiet self-confidence, for all that.
On the Malvern Rd shopping strip, sleek Ray-Banned puffer-jacketted couples get magic coffees take-away and chat outside the food store Stocked, waiting for slices from the vast blocks of terrine and pâté as women and a few men slip into Lily B, for handmade lingerie, its four naked mannequins standing guard in the window; outside Woolies, stressed salt-‘n’-pepper-haired dads yell at Thomas and Lola, to geddinthuhcar, as they load up the back of the Rover, with casserole and bubbles for the weekend at the chalet.
The winter sun shines off the gleaming white utensils in the window of Minimax, said to be where Gina Riley and Jane Turner found the models for Prue and Trude, the aproned, alveolar haute-bourgeois doubles of Kath and Kim. That said, it’s not all truffle oil and duck pâté. On Malvern Rd, there’s an old-style motor repair shop, barn size, slicked with oil within, gleaming chrome exhaust pipes hanging from its door outside, there’s a cat therapy centre, a Beaurepaires.
Corrie Perkin’s much-loved bookshop is sadly gone, but there’s Molony’s ski apparel, whose display window is changed weekly, with artfully arranged coordinated jumpers, pom-pommed beanies and ski pants, all red one week, then yellow, grey and black the next, splashy big colour like those huge French ad posters in the Armidale High St galleries. The houses are Victorian and modern McMansion as you go east, chicified old workers’ cottages and old “six-pack” ‘60s blocks of flats as you go west, and then you hit a vast housing commission tower, or towers, done in a three-spoke wheel, the most Le Corbusier-esque the commission ever got. What went to build it were rows of shops and streets of terraces, planed flat for the cult of the modern.
As a consequence of that — and the hordes of Kiwi backpackers, and overseas students, and me in the boxy old six-pack flats — Hawksburn has both the highest average household salary income in the country, and the greatest disparity of wealth in any urban locale. Hard rubbish week in Hawksburn is incredible: whole discarded living rooms out on nature strips, found sculpture assemblages of the last days of globalisation, discarded flat-screen TVs — texta’ed “works!” signs stuck to them — leaning against black tub chairs and IKEA drawer sets. They’re gone days before the van comes, the Kiwis and housos, and me, stripping them like ants dismantling a dead bird.
Other than that, the twain do not meet, the crooked path of Cromwell St, separating roundheads from cavaliers.
T’was possibly always thus. The Wurundjeri hung on late here, with corroborees in Prahran in the 1880s. “Hawksburn” itself was a farm, an austere pre-boom-style building, just near where Cromwell St now runs. I believe you can see a treeline that survived the demolition, though that may be wishful thinking. The farm went when the rail to Dandenong, then Gippsland, was put through in the 1870s. Melburnians knew the city was becoming something more than a village when “Hawksburn” was carved up for villas and terraces, which began to fill in the south-eastern bank of the Yarra, a process that has now swept Melbourne all the way to Gippsland itself.
So, by the time Bertha Kitts arrived, Hawksburn was Metroland, Pooterville, 19th-century suburbia, the dream achieved of a house and bit of garden away from the smoking city. Trove yields more stories, simply by plugging names from the Sands and McDougall address directory — the pre-White Pages report, listing the address of everyone in Melbourne — into its maw. It tells us of the bizarre sweet shop hold-up of 1943, when a gunman barged into the confectioners run by Muriel Downes, demanding cash, with the chilling phrase (for 1943) “Give me the contents of the till, please”. Downes, no candy-ass, said “You’ve come to the wrong place”, turned her back on him and fetched Mr Morris, a “lodger”, oh yes, who made a citizen’s arrest. Then it gets weird; well, let The Herald tell it:
MAN WHO HELD UP SHOP CALLS ON WOMAN AGAIN
A man, whom Miss Muriel Downes believes to have been the one who held her up at her confectionery shop in Luxton Road, Hawksburn, on Saturday night, called at her shop today carrying a revolver, and asked her to go to the police station with him.
Again? “Calls on” woman? Go to the police station together? Three months later, court reports attest, the gunzel was acquitted on all charges. And no amount of parsing of the reports gives you any clue as to why or what anyone was thinking. It’s the record of a vanished civilisation working off different principles.
The shop row itself was a bit of a hang for military types. Long after Bertha Kitts had moved on, shop 4 was a lending library and a venue known as Luxton Hall, which hosted military unit reunions in the 1950s. Like many lending libraries, it became that ubiquitous post-war thing, the Book Exchange, piles of Mills & Boon and pulp thrillers and Man International, and an old vet sat among them smoking himself to death. Shop 2 was even more exciting. The abode of Miss Bissland, whose dressmaker store ran for decades, and whose no-good brother George lived upstairs, as no-good brothers always do. George makes several motor court appearances — knocking a woman flying as she came off a tram was his personal best — before his masterpiece of scurrility, covered in the divorce court report “A Secret Marriage”.
In 1920, he married a young woman, Cora, née Everett, who lived around the corner with her parents. In a stroke of bastard genius, George persuaded her not to inform them that relations had passed beyond the engagement stage. He then proceeded to visit her there for years, while telling the increasingly rattled parents that he was setting himself up in business. When Cora eventually blabbed, the father offered them quarters there, at which point George, presumably a dead spit for Terry Thomas, remembered pressing interstate business.
We know all this from the divorce court reports. Thank God for fault-based divorce; without it we would have no idea how people really lived, but imagine the horror of having to expose your lovelorn foolishness in order to win a desertion divorce. Cora, in case you’re wondering, did not become the Hawksburn Miss Havisham. By 1928 she had, according to Table Talk, Melbourne’s society bible, become Mrs William D Hunter.
But in my opinion, that is not the most extraordinary thing that happened in Luxton Place, Hawksburn. Two decades on, the shop would be a milk bar, and surely the only one in Melbourne run by a Japanese and Anglo couple, the Kuramotos, Alan and Edna. Alan Kuramoto’s father had lived in Malvern Rd, selling koi goldfish from ponds in his garden andm according to his newspaper ad, “Japanese midget”, i.e. bonsai trees. Edna Kuramoto (née Dawson) was a strikingly beautiful and elegant woman, who clearly didn’t care what anyone thought about what she wanted. There’s a photo of her in the Chinese Museum photo collection, lighting a cigarette for Charlie Hoong, the then “mayor of Chinatown”. The pure poise of it!
Before the milkbar, Alan was a boxer, training at Fullalove’s boxing gym in Lonsdale St, where visiting American Black and Thai boxers trained, prevailing attitudes suspended in a sort of racial temporary autonomous zone, only to return in the publicity as the “Thai Fly” faced various “Great White Hopes”. Boxing was just too much damn fun to let the defence of empire get in the way. Alan went from amateur to professional in the early 1940s before, er, events cut his career short.
By then Hawksburn, as Hawksburn, was almost gone. Tens of thousands of students were educated between the brown walls of its very Victorianly Victorian high school, now Leonard Joel auctions, few of them from Hawksburn, and that kept the name alive. Earlier, it had seen the founding of the Try Society, a network of boys’ reform clubs, which provided Melbourne’s “newsboys”, the newspaper sellers — it’s possibly why they operated as a de facto gang for decades.
Car mobility killed, or almost, Melbourne’s ‘burbadoons, Hawksburn and Cremorne, Travancore and Tally-Ho, Graythorn, Yarraberg, Tunstall and others wholly forgotten. And then in the ’60s, someone whacked a great big sign over the top of Williams Rd saying “Hawksburn!” and we were saved, the quiet antique shops, the closed-down hat emporium with a single chair in the window, Lily B staff washing the mannequins at 2 pm (I like to take sandwiches and make an afternoon of it).
Husband cafe, with the best scrambled eggs and passive aggression in Melbourne, the Madisons and Cassidys interning for photographers, getting the lunch orders, the dog walkers and the kaffeeklatsches, the shy teenage first dates in the front window of Fratelli’s pizza, the “Cat and the Moon” drag bar (or something like that) in the ’80s, a shopfront on the other side of the station, which I passed then, on one of those all-night walks of your 20s, or of my 20s, half-filled notebook in an overcoat pocket, beckoned in by a Pierrot-faced bouncer-doorbitch, and did not go, and how might things have been different if I had.
Eighty years earlier, Bertha Kitts’ teenage maidservant had taken a fine hat and blouse of hers to attend a party. She hadn’t meant any harm, she said, at the inevitable court hearing, but she had not come back for two days, suddenly scared at Bertha’s possible reaction. And who is, when reading that court report, not with that girl, wanting for one night the power of a finely made hat to confer its power to create new possibilities, to be someone else for a night?
Bertha asked for no conviction to be recorded. By that act of mercy, the girl in question disappears from history. Bertha herself may have been innocent of the “hat scam” charge. We will never, ever know. And the whole place had at its centre, the Hawksburn (sometimes Prahran) Destructor, a mechanical garbage compressor installed in 1908, which roared and belched dust for blocks around, and was so huge that there is now a public park where it once stood.
But nothing is fully destructed now. All we Hawksburnians passed through this administratively created area, and the miracle of a ‘burb is that if we met up, from across a century, if we had loved the place, we would all have loved the same things about it: the avenues of plane trees, crests touching in the summer, or in winter, their bare branches like shatter lines in the white sky; the neat elegance of the Arts and Crafts station, done under the direction of Victoria Railways architect JF Harding, its exaggeratedly tall chimneys and wide platform roofs with more than a touch of the (yet unknown) Frank Lloyd Wright, the golden light of late afternoon caught in the perfectly composed rose gardens along Surrey Rd.
And these dozen people with their stories are from four dwellings and 20 years, in a suburb of 2,000 houses in the 500 suburbs of two centuries of this one small city. In The White Hotel of DM Thomas (sometime Melbourne resident), the narrator hovers at Baba Yar, and notes that you could have pen in hand here to the end of time and still not record all the lives. But you do not need a real-time massacre to make the point.
Hawksburn is a cut-out square, on one First Peoples’ land, a place made out of money and a draughtsman’s T-square. The sepia river of Trove, the anti-Lethe, remembering all, carries us all, the named and the eternally mysterious, away together. The final public appearance of a Bissland (the Hawksburn Bisslands are the sole Melbourne bearers of the surname) is a library record of Judith Masson Bissland’s Picturebooks to Grow On: An annotated bibliography of non-sexist picturebooks, a 1985 publication of Prahran TAFE, ring-bound and bubble jet printed, it being difficult to imagine a more ‘80s object. Today the shop row holds design offices and, where the tearooms were a century ago, a cafe.
Two years after digging all this out, I cracked, broke the “don’t leave the archive” rule, called the only Kuramoto in the Melbourne White Page, and got Peter, Alan’s son.
“Yeah, apparently Dad was going great guns in the boxing for a while.”
And then, “Forty-two, I guess, what, he was interned?”
“Interned?” A brief puzzled silence. “Oh, no. He joined the Air Force.”
“He joined the Air Force?”
“He used his mother’s name, Young.”
“And after being the only Japanese-Australian in the Air Force, he…”
“…came back, to Hawksburn.”
